Gov't must be honest about scale of Ghana's power crisis - Expert

Energy Expert, Benjamin Boakye suspects managers of the country's power sector are not giving accurate accounts of the energy challenges facing the nation.

The Director of Operations and Resource Mobilization at the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) said it was “amazing” and unbelievable that a country with the capacity to generate 2,800 megawatts of power, is unable to meet a peak demand of 1,900 megawatts of power for of its people.

He said it is surprising that the nation continues to experience blackouts despite the drastic fall in the price of crude from $100 to $48 per barrel on the international market.

Suggesting that government is not being truthful with Ghanaians, Mr. Boakye said, “Tomorrow we are told that we are not able to procure light crude oil; another day it's because we are not having enough gas from Nigeria [and] at another time you are told that we are not paying enough [tariff] to raise revenue to buy light crude oil. I think we need to come clean on this.” He was speaking on Joy FM's Super Morning Show, Monday, January 26.

For almost four years now, Ghanaians have been enduring long hours of power outages due to the inability of the producers to generate sufficient power to meet the country's energy needs. It is the longest period ever that consumers have had to endure the situation. 

Many businesses have folded up because they could not afford the high cost of generators while others have been forced to drastically cut down on their staff strength in order to make savings to cater for alternative sources of power. 

The Bui Hydro-Electric Dam
Technical audit
Mr. Boakye has called for a technical audit of all power generating plants “to enable us understand what the problems are with the plants.”  According to him, officials handling the plants could be responsible for the worsening situation.

He claimed that the Takoradi Thermal Plant (T-3) for instance, has been inefficient because it was not built to suit our environment. The expert also doubts explanations by the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) and the power providers that the outages are as a result of equipment breakdowns and gas shortages.  

“Because T-3 for example…was not configured to our environment. It was a plant that was configured to be operational with submarines and we went and bought to it to use in high-temperature areas as ours." 

He questioned: “who did the due diligence and used our money to buy that?”

The Aboadze Thermal Plant
Government, he noted has the responsibility to ensure that “the technocrats who are taking the decision are taking the right decision other than that, the blame would have to go to the government”.

“Because, if somebody would have to take a decision to buy a plant that cannot run in our environment and we lose money and the plant is not working for us then somebody has to take the blame for it,” he told host of the Show, Kojo Yankson.

The same could be happening to a lot of the plants and we are not being told the truth, Mr. Boakye concluded.

Akosombo Hydro-Electric Dam. Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Jerry Tsatro Mordy | [email protected]